Accounting

6 June 2012

In this new blog, I would like to talk about accountancy. I will specialize my Master’s degree in auditing, controlling and corporate finance, so I have lately been working on accounting tasks for Broadgate Financial and the Easy Panel project.

A lot of people tend to ask me why I choose accountancy as a career path, and my answer is pretty simple. Where people see boredom, I see efficiency. Indeed, while in marketing or communication there are many solutions to a problem and many ways to deal with it, there is only one right result in accounting. I understand that for some people, this is not attracting at all because it is too framed, but I have a Cartesian spirit so I reflect like that. It can be perceived as a burden because all companies have to deal with it but it is actually a very important matter.

The main purpose of accountancy is to communicate financial information to stakeholders in a business entity, generally in the form of financial statements. It permits to record, classify, summarize and interpret transactions and events of financial character. Accountancy principles occur in three areas: accounting, bookkeeping and auditing.

This concept is actually very old. The earliest accounting records which were found in Mesopotamia, were used 7,000 years ago. At that time, people used primitive accounting methods to record the growth of crops and herds. It then evolved, improving over the years as business advanced and new problems rose. Today, accounting is called “the language of business” because it is the vehicle for reporting financial information about a business entity to many different groups of people.

Every company needs to handle it in the most transparent manner because a fail to manage it properly can conduct to massive problems. In large public corporations, we even speak about political and business scandals. Such misdeeds typically involve complex methods for misusing or misdirecting funds, overstating revenues, understating expenses, overstating the value of corporate assets or underreporting the existence of liabilities, sometimes with the cooperation of officials in other corporations or affiliates. The most famous one is the Enron scandal which was revealed in 2001. It led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company with a revenue of $101 billion, the dissolution of Arthur Anderson, one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world, and a loss of nearly $11 billion for shareholders. So, you have to take it very seriously!

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